Painting your Frame - The PMB Painting Process.

We get lots of questions about the painting process and how we achieve all the combinations, colours and effects on our repaints. The way we paint a frame is very different to how a factory doing 500+ frames of the same style would so it can be easy to underestimate the work involved. A commercial factory would mainly use standard colours and waterslide, screen printed decals. We cannot buy these or create one off sets economically so we must custom make our decals for each job. Below we have tried to provide an explanation of the process involved from start to finish.

Pic 1. The first stage of a multi colour Candy style repaint. In this case the frame is painted White but normally the base for a Candy would be silver or Virtual Shadow Chrome. The base colour is what gives a Candy its depth and "pop" value. The final colour is fully dependent on this first layer.

Pic 2. Shows the Candy coat applied, in this case Gold. This is translucent and applied as multiple coats until the desired effect has been achieved. Note this has also been clear-coated so it can be worked on without damage.

Pic 3. It's time for the decals. We do not buy these or make them in bulk, each set is made for each job. We find that even the same model bike will have different sized decals for each different frame size. We often get asked if we can cut some decals for people to put over the existing decals but because of the variations it is nearly impossible to do this accurately. All our decals have been cut as stencils or masks (not stickers placed on top) and are then painted on as demonstrated below for a smooth almost zero edge finish.

Pic 1 Base

Pic 2 Candy

Pic 3 Decal stencils

Pic 4. Here we have the frame with the areas that are to stay Gold masked off, the decals have been applied, then a Candy Red has been put down. Additional areas have been masked ready for the next colour.

Pic 5. Is where the final colour, Black has been applied. All masking has been removed, the edges are cleaned up and a coat of Gloss Ceramic Clear is applied to the entire frame. This the 3rd time the frame has been cleared!

Pic 6 . The final result! All the gloss areas were masked off and a final coat of Matte Clear was applied to the Black sections of the frame to achieve a multi level Gloss/Matte finish.